


Something Stolen, Something Given

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: String Theory [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, F/M, Fluff, Getting Together, PTSD, Pining, Post Cycle-65, Spoilers for TSC, mentions of canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 00:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11589396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: Lucretia recuperates from her year alone. Lup grabs her shovel. Magnus catches a bad case of feelings.





	Something Stolen, Something Given

**Author's Note:**

> ...what started as a short warm-up drabble... snowballed... into almost 15k of... cheesy, cliche, pining fluff... GEESH.  
>  Anyway shout out to all those writers who gave me magcretia feels! Because HOT DAMN.

Magnus isn’t worried about Lucretia at first. Sure, they’re all a little concerned about her, despite the brave face she’s been putting on since bawling herself to sleep when they all reformed—some of the things she tells them about the year are awful, horrifying, but she says it like it’s brushing dirt off of her sleeves. And after that, she just picked up and put herself back into the swing of things. It’s disconcerting, but they don’t really know what to do about it.

She’s speaking up more, joking around with Lup and Taako more, arguing a bit more firmly than before, sure, but they all expected _something_ to be different after being alone like that. So, no, he’s not _overly_ concerned—he’s pretty sure she’d let them know if something was really wrong, the same way she laid out the damage to the ship in dry terms, saying with a mouthful of granola that _‘I don’t think my shitty engine repair job is gonna last the year you guys, just sayin’. We’re gonna have to do intensive repairs this year.’_  

He doesn’t start really, truly, honestly worrying about her until she nearly kills him:

It’s well past local midnight a few days before the Light is set to fall—they’ve been taking it easy so far, staying a ways away from civilization, concerned mostly with relishing the fact that their journey didn’t meet a statue-bound end and fixing the ship. But he just can’t sleep; there’s nothing dangerous so far, there’s just the relaxed monotony of welding and sanding and the occasional explosion from Lup and Barry fucking around with shit—there’s no reason he shouldn’t be sleeping well. But it feels too much like that moment he froze, like that moment he realized that, _well, shit, it’s over this year—maybe forever_.

He jogs through the woods in silent contemplation for what feels like a few hours—the sky is beginning to turn from velvet dark to a light indigo, and dew wets his sweatpants as he comes back around to the ship. He sees the light up on the deck before he sees Lucretia herself, hunched underneath her bobbing spell, sketchbook propped up on her drawn-in knees, hand moving indistinctly.

He climbs up on the deck, and the second his hands grab onto the railing she screams. She throws her hand out, arm straight and rigid, silver fire beading up on her fingers.

He lets go of the rails the second he sees her head whip around and fingers stretch, and he falls to the ground so he wouldn’t get Missile’d in the face—what a way to go, dead three days into the cycle (again) because he’d scared Lucretia.

“It’s me—it’s me!”

“Oh, god—”

Lucretia peeks over the edge of the ship, hands over her mouth. “Magnus— _shit_ , are you okay?”

“I’m good, you good?”

“You just,” she says, leaning down and holding her hand out to him.

He doesn’t really need the hand up, but he touches her fingers anyway, a quick tap like a high-five before climbing back up.

“I just?”

“You—startled me,” she says, looking uncomfortable. Her eyes slide over him, then to somewhere in the distance. He looks over his shoulder on instinct, then back to her. Her gaze is unfocused, somewhere else, and he thinks she should probably go to bed.

“I didn’t let you know,” he says as gently as possible. “I get it.” And he does—she told them, plainly, about the marauders and the bandits and all the people and creatures that tried to crawl up onto the deck after her. He thinks he’s probably accidentally transported her right back to all of it. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head.

He rubs the back of his neck, the first pinpricks of worry starting to crawl over him. She looks exhausted—glazy-eyed and fidgety. He’s not quite sure what to say: that _he’s_ sorry he scared the shit out of her? Or that he’s a bit proud of her trigger reflex?

“I’m gonna head on in; you want me to wait up for you while you clean up?”

“Oh, no, I—I’ll be going to bed shortly, I just, I wanted to get something on paper,” she whispers, gesturing towards the bow, where there’s a clearing that creates a perfect line towards the horizon. “I—I thought it would look nice at this time of night, as a watercolor and—um. Yeah, it’s gonna be a little bit? I’m waiting for sunrise.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Yes,” she says softly, “It’s fine. Goodnight, Magnus.”

“Goodnight, Lucretia.”

He doesn’t think she goes to sleep—she’s still in the same place she was when he goes out the next morning, but maybe she just rose early. She’s just as alert as ever, whip-quick and dry-witted, but he keeps an eye on her. There was something off about her answer, about the way her face went slack—he knows that he’d terrified her in ways he hadn’t seen her scared in a long time. He’s used to the sort of terror on her face that’s a grim determination—her, _yes, this is the end of the world and it sucks, but we do this often_ , face—not the wide eyes and flared nostrils and shaking fingers.

He sticks close, keeps an eye on her. The more he watches, the more he realizes there’s just something not right about her. Not that he isn’t proud of her, and the way she’s changed; in fact, he’d be willing to fight over the title of Most Proud of Lucretia—but he’d have to fight everyone on the ship, and honestly, he doesn’t think she’d like that too much.  He hears her in the bridge with Davenport, hears her fussing at Barry over one of the calibrations on the ship’s arcane cores, startling him and Lup both with her accuracy. She makes Taako let her cook with him, and they go out to the town a few miles out to get supplies—they both come back with a green powder they make into some sort of drink that they both crow in delight over, ecstatic over its floral taste and vivid coloration.

But he notices that she hangs back at times, her face slack and vague, her fingers touching her throat or her shoulder. That sometimes he finds her pacing up and down the hallway, fingers on the soldered metal, murmuring under her breath. Sometimes she looks at her food like she doesn’t know what to do with it, or she nurses a drink for the whole day. He hears her counting under her breath once, and he realizes she’s counting hours and days. She flinches sometimes, when someone touches her suddenly—once she drops a plate in the galley when Barry bumps into her, his nose deep in one of the records about the engine. There’s a lot of fumbling and apologizing between them, but Magnus catches the look of unbridled terror in her eyes before she shuts down, her voice taking on a sterner cadence as she apologizes and tells Barry that it’s her fault, too, for spacing out, don’t worry, she doesn’t need the help.

Magnus is of the opinion that she does.

By the time the Light falls, he’s certain that Lucretia’s not entirely as okay as she says; that she’s lost something indefinable in the year without them despite all that she’d gained as well. He almost wants to make her stay on the ship when she volunteers to go with him— not because he doesn’t want her around, but because there’s a lingering what if in the back of his mind. What if it goes bad? What if they have to fight? Will she be all right if they do? Will _he_ be, if something were to happen?

But in the end, they don’t have to fight to get it—it falls somewhere uninhabited, straight into the center of a crystal-clear lake. Lucretia looks delighted in the face of so much clear water, grinning happily as they tromp towards the shore, the Light making the water glisten and shimmer from where it sits on the lakebed.

The words, “I’ll get it—” aren’t even out of his mouth before Lucretia’s shaking her boots off, shouting:

“Nope—let me!”

Then her robe follows her boots on the mossy bank and he starts to splutter as she strips down to her khaki slacks and a dark sports bra.

“Oh, geesh, Magnus, grow up,” she laughs.

“Don’t think that’s possible!” he shouts, covering his eyes as she starts to unbutton her pants.

“Magnus, we spent a year on the beach,” she chides. “Like? Really. I’m going down to grab it—you cover for me, okay? I’d feel better if you took your hands off of your eyes when you do it.”

“I— _I_ could go get it! And you could put your clothes back on! It’d be great!”

She tips her head as he peeks through his fingers at her. He knows she has a point, that he shouldn’t be so shocked to see her strip down—they’ve all seen each other in various states of nakedness, and it’s not a big deal except that… for some reason it is? If it were Lup or any of the other teammates, he’d probably be flinging his clothes off too to go for a swim. But it’s _Lucretia_ , and for some reason, that distinction makes him nervous, even though it’s not the first time he’s seen her in her underwear or swimsuit. Maybe it’s just that he’s never seen her literally fling her clothes off before—an action much more suited to Lup or himself.

That’s… all?

He keeps his gaze trained on her face as he peeks out at her. Her face is stern, even though her mouth keeps twitching up into a smile as she puts her hands on her hips, leaning up onto her toes.

“It’s like this, Magnus: I have ulterior motives. I really want to go for a swim,” she says seriously, stepping up close to him. She looks at him under his palms, a sly smile on her face. “It’s not the beach, but it’s close. I’m going to go get the Light, and then I’m going to swim around for a bit.”

“Oh,” he says. He looks up at the sky, shrugging; “Go on, then.”

She grins at him, then turns and laughs, taking off towards the water. And she dives before the water really hits her waist, and she goes under, and he can still see her under the surface, a dark dart of movement in the clear water.

He ignores the dryness in his throat and the burn on the back of his neck. She surfaces moments later, and paddles back to shore, dripping and exultant as she hands him the Light. She turns, then jumps right back in, floating on her back with her eyes closed and a contented grin on her face. She tips her head back and her mouth parts open in a happy sigh, and he has the biggest urge to do something stupid.

So he does. He sheds his jacket and covers the Light with it, runs, and cannonballs into the lake; he hears her shriek as he goes under, body sinking to the smooth sandy bottom. He sits there for a count of five, letting his air run out as he tries not to think of the way her hair billowed out in the water or the gleam of it on her stomach and knees,  or how she’s literally swimming around in her underwear—not a swimsuit— or the mole he saw on the inside of her bicep or the thin expanse of her shoulders, or the way the light hits her dark skin, or the curve of her hips, because it’s _Lucretia_ , oh god. The distinction is important and it makes him nervous.

He kicks up off of the bottom, and she immediately splashes him, nose wrinkled up and her grin crooked. He splashes her back and she shrieks, flinging a hand across the water right back at him.

He gets sunburned and she gets waterlogged, and they play for so long that Taako and Lup get sent after them, and they walk back—him in his soaked uniform and her with her robe tied around her waist like a skirt and her boots, the light tied up in the rest of her clothes like they’re a pack.

He looks back at her as she laughs with Lup; he can hear her talking—Lup’s teasing her about dicking around, and she’s not even denying it, and there’s something so carefree in how she says ‘ _Remember, there were barely any lakes last year—I had to conserve all the water I could, so fuck it. I went swimming’_ that hurts. She’s laughing but it doesn’t really reach her eyes and they meet gazes, and she gives him a small shake of her head at his frown.

Taako snaps his fingers between them. “Up and forward, homie,” he says, a smirk curling across his face.

“Uhhhh…”

Taako simply snickers, crossing his arms behind his head.

That night, Magnus can’t sleep. He’s tired from swimming, from walking, but he can’t sleep. Each time he closes his eyes, he remembers the inch of limestone across his body, all the darkness, and then waking up again in the silver flash, seeing Lucretia crumble to the floor.

Her vacant gaze two weeks ago after she assaulted him in a panic. How she jumps and jolts and all the oddities he’d noticed in the past few days. The softness her voice still has even when she’s being firm, the grin on her face as she dived into the lake after the Light.

The line of her spine as she lifted her shirt off and… Nope. Not thinking about it, he’s not thinking about it.

He sits up in the dark and slides his shoes on, intending to do a few laps to settle his mind.

Light glimmers in the hallway, cast from the crack in Lucretia’s door. He steps forward to close it—she never really likes having her door open at night, especially not now, and as he reaches, he hears her voice, soft and shaking.

She’s crying. He looks through the crack in her door and sees her tangled up in her sheets, twisting in her sleep. He watches as she cries out again, head turning to her shoulder, muscles cording. Her feet draw up and she jolts like she’s been shot, eyes flying open with a gasp.

He steps back quickly, but he hears her when she starts to sob. He hears Fisher, too, humming softly at her, an oscillation he recognizes as nervous concern.

There’s more to what happened to her than what she told them. They all know, to an extent, that she held back the worst details in lieu of deflecting attention from her to the ship—but he doesn’t think any of them truly grasped how deeply it changed her. He thinks he’s starting to understand:  He sees it in the way she trails her fingers against the spots she’s welded. In the crack in Fisher’s tank. In how she steps back from them all sometimes, like it's just too much for her to suddenly be around so many people again.  

There’s something that’s been burned out of her—they might have been the ones under the scrutiny of judicial gods, but Lucretia had her own trial of fire and in it, she’s lost something. There’s still something that’s burning in her, and it hurts her, and he can’t protect her from it.

He wants to. He’s gotten used to protecting them all, protecting her when he hangs around the ship with her, and she doesn’t need it, not really—she never really _has_ , she’s always been more than capable, but she’s always been so quiet and small that it became second nature to him, to _all_ of them, to step between her and danger.

But even though she _can_ defend herself, he can’t just let her cry in there alone every night. The thought of it agonizes him.

So, after dinner the next night, he knocks on her door, his arms full of wood, knives strapped to his belt.

“I’m here to spend some time with Fisher,” he announces.

She looks at him, and then laughs, rolling her eyes as she pulls her door all the way open. “Well, okay,” she says.

He sits by the foot of her unmade bed, spreads out his tools on a spare sheet that she shakes at him, and starts carving.

He notices her room, usually pristine, is littered with paper. Somehow, he’d managed to miss the breadth of the mess when he darted in to check on Fisher when they returned to their recorded state—they’ve just been so focused, so focused on making sure everything was okay, so focused on Lucretia’s stories and her records of what she did with the ship and with studying the Light after their successful retrieval this cycle. He’s not even sure anyone other than himself comes in and out of her room; no one else has probably even _seen_ the mess.

Her clothes, her belongings are heaped in piles like they’d been dumped out and riffled through. Her journals are strewn across the floor—some of them are ripped and bent, smudged with ash and dirt and water. There are bottles of acrylic paint burst, and there are multicolored footprints dried into the shine—some are small, bare prints, others are large with strange treads.

There's a handprint smeared across the wall, and his stomach lurches. It's small. He knows the shape and size of it without knowing how he does.

“Lucretia,” he says. She looks up from her desk, pen in each hand. “Is that… _blood_?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Is… why haven't you cleaned it—Lucretia, what happened? Why—”

She sets her pens down and folds her hands in her lap.

“I went to sleep,” she says flatly. “And, well. I told you; there were other people aside from that court that wanted the ship and me.”

“Wanted… oh, god.”

“Don't worry, they didn't live long enough to think past the bounty on bringing me in,” she says, a strange bitter sneer crossing her face. She turns her head from him, studying the handprint on the wall.

“I didn't sleep in here again—I don’t think I came in here more than once or twice after,” she says. “I didn't have the chance to clean it up, and now… I just… I… haven't had the chance.”

Magnus doesn't comment on the obvious lie.

He watches her fingers curl into her pants and sees the small shake of her head. He wants to ask her if the blood on the wall is hers, if they hurt her, where the scars would be if they managed to accrue them upon their bodies—wants to reach out and cover those small hands with his own, to stop them from shaking like they are.

She got so strong without any of them seeing, but as proud as he is, none of them wanted it to come at this price. She paid dearly for this, and with a flush of shame and anger, he realizes he’s not sorry that that world is gone now.

“I can, I can help you clean up,” he offers. “I have a, I have a rough idea of how you? Um. Kept it.”

She shakes her head again. “Not tonight,” she says. “Thank you, that's very sweet.”

He swallows, hands shaking against the roughly hewn duck, shaking his head softly. “It's just… are you _okay_?”

“Maybe,” Lucretia answers. “Eventually.”

The honesty takes him off guard; if it were him, he'd lie. But she looks at him steadily, her eyes flicking from his shaking hands to his face and she shakes her head.

“Would you have rather I lied? I made it through it; I can make it through the aftermath just the same. It’s just… slow going.”

He makes up his mind right then—he rushes in: “You won't have to do it alone this time.”

He'd already decided he wasn't going to leave that night, but this just cements the notion further. He’s parked now, and he’s not moving. If he eventually has to coax the rest of the team into Lucretia’s room for her to get a good night’s sleep, to put her room back to sorts, to ease the pain she still feels from her time alone, then he’d do that too. But he’s staying, he’s staying and they’re going to clean her room back up, and… Whatever it takes to help her through it.

“Magnus,” she says gently. “That's…”

Something strange flits across her face, a cross between pain and a small smile. “That’s very kind, Magnus, but please… don’t feel like you’re obligated to.”

“What?”

“Because you feel bad,” she says. She’s watching Fisher in their tank, the lights glittering off of her dark irises. “I know that everyone feels bad, guilty, because they died. But it happened. And it’s done now.”

“It’s not done for you,” Magnus argues. “I can see it’s not, Lucretia. You’re still—you’re still _there_. I know you are—and I am too, I’m still there, at night, I think about what—what could have gone differently, how I could have fought better, wiser, done more. I could have done my _job_ better, protected the others, if I thought a little faster, talked a little smoother.”

“I think that if Taako couldn’t smooth-talk himself out of death,” Lucretia murmurs. “Then no one could have.”

Her face goes vague again, and Magnus doesn’t know what to do to help her, just like he doesn’t know how to pull himself up out of the pit of guilt he feels for failing everyone. For failing _her,_ for taking so long to notice what she’s been dealing with in the aftermath.  

She’s silent for a long moment, and then shakes her head like she’s clearing it. “Anyway. Why don’t you get onto bed? I think Davenport wants to open up the hull tomorrow, so it’s probably a good idea to get a early start.”

“Not tired,” Magnus says, “I wanna finish this duck for Fisher.”

“Okay,” Lucretia says slowly, watching as Magnus deliberately puts the duck down, half-finished, before picking up a new block of wood. “Um.”

“Not this one though, I won’t be done until I finish the first one.”

“Oh god, really?”

Her laugh is loud and delighted, just like it was when she ran to the lake, and Magnus feels a surge of pride for being able to tug the sound out of her.

“Really, Magnus? Is that how it is?”

“Yep.”

“God,” she laughs, “That’s the most passive aggressively caring thing I’ve seen since Taako locked Lup and Barry in the lab.”  

She stands and pads over to him, gingerly touching the top of his head as she passes. “Have fun with that.”

“Hey, it only works if you stay in the room!”

“I’m coming back,” she says, “It’s my room after all.”

She grabs a set of pajamas from her drawers, raising her eyebrow down at Magnus as she crosses her arms over her stomach, pajamas draped across her forearms; “Unless you’re fine with me changing in here, Mister _‘put your clothes on, it’d be great!’_ Burnsides?”

“No, no, okay, I get it!” he says, voice sounding a little too loud to his ears as he feels his neck grow warm. She’s been spending way too much time with the twins, he thinks, because the quirk of her eyebrow and the cock of her hip are too much like them, but so entirely her.

“That’s what I thought,” she laughs, slipping from the room with a gentle pat to Fisher’s tank.

If he’d said yes, would she let him stay with his eyes closed? Or would she send him out? Would she peel her shirt off the same way she did at the lake, arms crossed at her waist and spine curving in the way women did that he never quite figured out how they uncrossed their arms as they came up, or—

He shakes himself out of his thoughts, face burning. It’s Lucretia. _Lucretia_. Who needs comforting, who needs to work through the year, who needs a friend—not his wandering thoughts that involved the line of her neck and the bun piled atop her head, white hair spilling out in bouncy coils against the tips of her ears and the fullness of her lips.

He shakes his head, realizing he’d drifted off into daydreams about his friend and crewmate—she’s family now, which should mean he shouldn’t be… But Barry and Lup, and they had started out as officer and subordinate (though the distinctions no longer matter, save for Davenport, who will always be the Captain)… so it wouldn’t be the first time… He shakes his head again, popping himself on the cheeks.

He looks up at Fisher, who wiggles their tentacles at him excitedly, slipping one out of the top of the tank to flap at him, humming.

“Sorry, this one’s not done. I have a plan, so I… bear with me, buddy?”

Fisher smacks the side of the tank with its tentacles, flashing at him.

“I’ll make you one on the sly,” he promises. “This one right here is for Capt’n’port.”

“Is _that_ how you’re playing it?” Lucretia asks.

Magnus looks up at her, mouth suddenly very dry. Just like before, at the lake, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before—the crew’s had more pajama parties, legitimate parties as well as midnight emergency gatherings, so he knows what they sleep in. But he’s thought this through poorly, not considered the way his thoughts have been focusing on her, or the tightness in his throat and chest when she smiles.

She stands before him in her usual pajamas—a tee and a pair of red shorts with the Institute logo on the bottom cuff, both worn down from decades and decades of wear. The tee is thin and the lettering is worn off of it, but he’s pretty sure it was a gag gift from Merle a few years ago—he can still make out the cartoon cat outline and faded all caps _don’t stress meowt_ on the thin cotton. The edges of the shorts are frayed,  and she has socks on, little white things that don’t go above her ankles that somehow Magnus finds incredibly endearing— and she’s got her glasses on, round-rimmed and gold, and his heart just thuds when he focuses on the mugs in her hands.

“Compliments of Taako,” she says, nodding at them. She holds one out to him, and he takes it, fingers finding warm ceramic easier than he thought he would when his stomach and heart are in such turmoil.

“Thank you,” he says. “What’d you have to do to get this?”

“Threaten to make it myself,” she answers. “He’s fussing with the green tea stuff from the markets and wanted me out of, and I quote, his kingdom.”

She walks around to her desk; she grabs a few things, then returns to his side, sinking down to the ground.

He sips the cocoa slowly, trying not to focus on her warmth beside him or the brush of her knee against his thigh as she settles in.

He watches as she lays her sketchpad across her crossed ankles, a half-done sketch of Fisher on the page.

“He was really… he seemed a little too happy to make them once he realized you were in here,” Lucretia muses into her mug.

 _Shit_ , Mangus thinks.

He’s only just beginning to put the pieces together—he’s only just realizing what it means, what she means to him, and Taako already knows just from catching him staring once. And he’s teasing Lucretia about it without her even knowing why. His face burns.   

“Who even knows,” he mumbles.

“True,” she sighs, setting her mug aside. “I think he was just giving me the boot.”

He turns his gaze from the floor to her, and then laughs. “Uh, you’ve got a—” he motions at his mouth and she reaches up to wipe her chin, but misses the spot of whipped cream and cinnamon.

“No,” he snickers. He feels a little mean, but she’s so… “Other side,” he lies.

“Where?” She misses it again, and she must be doing it on purpose too, because she’s smirking at him, laughing and touching her nose instead of the corner of her mouth.

“Here? Or?” She touches her cheek instead, biting her bottom lip as she laughs.

“I’ll getcha,” he says, reaching out to run his thumb against the spot. He wipes it off easily, then pauses.

If he put the ball of his thumb to her mouth, would she lick it off? If he licked it off, would it be like kissing her? He has the strangest urge to know what she’d do. Would she laugh at him again? He hopes she would, because it’s almost like standing in the sunshine, listening to her laugh. He thinks about how she flinches, though, and wonders if it would be too much.

Instead, he rubs his thumb against his knee, shaking his head at her. “Geesh, Luce,” he murmurs.

She licks her lips absently, her eyes flicking down to his knee. She looks sheepish all of a sudden, and Magnus isn't exactly sure what he did wrong.

“You too?” She sighs.

“What? Oh—oops was, was that a Lup-and-Taako only thing?”

“No. I mean at first, yeah, they were the only ones who did it,” she answers. “Everyone else just picked it up too.”

She stretches her legs out and sets her sketchpad aside, then pulls her knees into her chest, crossing her arms over them. “Like. As in, this week, I've been called all sorts of derivatives of _Lucy_ and _Lu_ and like,” she pauses and laughs. “I told Merle not to call me his aunt and no one got the joke other than Davenport. _Tia_ , like, please, anything but! It's just… everyone is… they're all…”

She shrugs and lays her cheek against her arms. “I love you all,” she whispers. “And I, I knew you all loved me too, but everyone is so… I don't know what to do with it right now. I'm just… drowning in it. I was so lonely last year. I probably would have burned the whole world down if I thought it would get you back to me faster. But now that you’re here, I just—it feels like I’m a glass and you keep pouring into me, more and more, and I can’t hold it all.”

“I'm sorry,” Magnus murmurs, feeling a bit guilty. “I can leave,” he offers. “If you want to… be alone.”

“No, don't be sorry,” Lucretia says. She smiles over at him, her glasses lopsided and her eyes slightly damp. “Stay. Fisher missed you.”

_Did you miss me, too?_

But he doesn't ask. He knows the answer—of course she missed them, but he hopes that maybe she missed him a little more than the others.

He turns the duck in his hands slowly, trying to think of something to say, some way to convey that he's sorry he never showed her before how much he cares, that the whole team is tripping over themselves in the same sort of way. That they’re just in awe of her, that there’s no way to describe the parallel dread and pure, electric hope of realizing she wasn’t there on that platform with them. The bitter despair of the possibility that she was already dead and gone and they had no recourse paired with the fierce desire for her to be out there, to be alive. There’s no way to put that into words, not really, so they heap praises and pats on the back and nicknames onto her, shove extra food on her plate and tuck her close to them as they talk. He wants to tell her that they don’t mean to smother her, to make her feel like she’s helpless with how much they’ve pushed at her; it’s just that they are so proud. They are so proud of her, and they’re terrified, deep down, that that pride in what she’s done is going to break her in half.

She watches him for a moment, and his discomfort rises, face growing hot. Sometimes, he thinks she can see through them all, see the things that they don't. He knows she _can,_ she knows when someone is hurt or upset just because she knows what to look for.

What does she see? What has he missed that she can tell him? He thinks he’s in inexplicable trouble; waters he’s never tread before.

She stretches her legs back out and picks up her sketchbook. He feels like he's missed a moment to say something important.

It's just that he doesn't know what that important thing was. Not yet. It feels like he's close to it, like it's on the tip of his tongue.

He watches her tap her pencil to her lips, eyes unblinking for a brief second before she starts back in on her drawing.

The silence evens out and he picks up his carving again, mind emptying out as he focuses on just making his little trinkets for his friends.

Time passes; the hall lights go down, signaling that Davenport has gone to bed. Lucretia finishes the first drawing and sets in on sketching something else, something that requires broader strokes that brings her elbow brushing against his leg and he can't bring himself to shuffle away.

He finishes his not-for-Fisher duck and begins to polish it. He feels Lucretia against his arm—first a brush. Then warmth and her weight; he looks over, and she's slumped against him, fingers loosely curled around her pencil, asleep. She’s been sketching him, it looks like, and his heart thuds uncomfortably in his chest. He doesn’t know what to do—he feels a bit like the glass she’d described earlier, full, full, overflowing.

He sets the duck aside and just sits. After a while, he reaches out and very gently takes the pencil from her hands and sets it aside. Then, when he's sure it won't wake her, he slips the sketch pad from her lap. He puts away his own things, sliding them out of the way under her bed.

He leans his head back against the base of her bed, eyes closed as he listens to the ambient noises of the ship. The ever present hum of the bond engine. The quiet sound of water filtering and splashing from Fisher’s tank. The air system kicking on, a bit louder than it was the year before. He catalogues them all before he lets himself listen to Lucretia breathe, slow and steady. He feels her chest move with each breath, and with his eyes closed, it's easier to catalogue why it's so nice.

She must have felt safe to fall asleep with him like this. She trusts him, trusts him to be with her like this after her year alone, doesn't mind his presence even when she's admitted their attention is suffocating. Lets him into her room even though movements out of the corner of her eyes spooks her, was candid with him about how she’s doing when he thought she’d just deflect. She trusts him.

She sleeps quietly at first; he's still awake when her nightmares begin. He tucks his arm around her and pulls her close.

“You're safe now,” he whispers.  “Luce, the worst is done.”

She turns against him and shakes her head. “I'm sorry,” she says, voice hoarse. “I'm sorry—“

He pulls her closer, hand curled around her arm. They’ve been telling her, all along, that she has nothing to apologize for—it isn’t helping to tell her that. He rubs his thumb against her arm.

“I know,” he says instead. And she quiets, sags against him and he very gently reaches out to pick her up.

She doesn’t fight as he fits his hands against her waist and pulls her to sit between his knees, her legs slung over his thigh. He leans her against his chest and her posture is stiff but she remains silent, and as the seconds pass, she sinks against him, her shoulders slumping forward.

“Go back to sleep, you’re safe,” he says quietly. “You’re safe with me. And Fisher,” he adds. “Fisher’s here too.”  

She gives a soft laugh, then nods and gingerly rests her head against his shoulders.

He wraps his arms back around her, fingers lacing against her hip. She starts again and then shifts, curling herself up smaller in the space between his arms. His fingers brush the skin of her thighs as she moves, but he keeps himself slack as she tries to shuffle herself closer.

He leans his chin against her head and she gives a soft sigh—or maybe it's a yawn—and he closes his eyes and listens. His heartbeat is loud in his ears, a dull thudding that he _knows_ she can hear. His breath, thank god, is even, even though her hair tickles his nose, and his fingers are slack against her. He wants to clutch her closer, pull her all the way against him, compact her already small frame against his own and shield her from all of it. But there is no protection from what is inside, and this is all he can do.

She falls asleep easily, and the swiftness she falls slack against him makes Magnus suspect she's not been attempting to go back to sleep after the nightmares rouse her. It pains him to think that she’s been sitting up alone—that he even stumbled across her sleepless night before, and he’d bought into her lie. He wishes he’d been a bit quicker on the uptake, that she’d been a bit more honest, that they’d all just been better with handling her.

It's cruel, almost, that she has to live with the aftermath, but not have the physical scars. There are times that he himself wonders if any of their battles are really _real_ without that tangible evidence. Sometimes he wonders if the last real fight he was in was when he got that stupid black eye decades and decades and decades ago. It's a silly thought, he knows what they’re doing matters on the largest scale possible, but that's just how it is sometimes.

He grows drowsy. She's warm and soft and she smells good, like the library-like scent of paper and ink that permeates her room, and the subtly spicy soap that they brought back from the town with the drink mixes and food. If he concentrates hard enough, he thinks he can still smell the lingering whiffs of cinnamon from their cocoa mugs. It’s incredibly comfortable.

He lifts her slowly; she's laughably light to him. They all are; he's made games of lifting them all up at least once. The first time he'd picked up Lucretia she'd squeaked and kicked in the chair (that he picked up too), and Lup had magicked her dinner to follow them around the deck as he did his (as dared upon) lap around the ship with her laughing as salad and soup trailed behind them.

But he’s noticed that she’s not been eating much. He’ll have to tell Taako—he'll put up with the smug teasing if it means he can coax Lucretia into eating.

He lays her gently in the bed, pulling her sheets over her. He grabs the spare blanket from the foot of her bed and lies beside the bed.

He closes his eyes and sleeps.

When he wakes up, she's looking down at him from her bed, her chin tucked against her knees. Her glasses rest on the tip of her nose and she smiles at him, soft and sweet, and his heart skips as he instinctually grins back up at her.

“You should have gone back to your own room,” she says, voice low and a little rough from sleep.

His heart thuds again and his stomach flips; the first words she's spoken that day are to him, and even though she's chiding him, it's still for _him_. He wants this, he wants her sleep-heavy voice and her first words of the day and her last words of the night, he wants to wake up and see her grin at him and wake up to soothe her back to sleep.

He realizes then that really is in trouble. No, not trouble: He’s _fucked._

“Your floor is comfortable,” he says.

She laughs, shaking her head at him. She drops one leg and nudges him with her foot against his stomach. “Yeah, right,” she says.

She pushes against him again and he laughs too, giddy with it. He grabs her ankle and tugs.

“Oh, no, no, no, nope!”

She tugs back, just a little, laughing as she grabs onto her sheets. He gives another little yank, just enough to scoot her towards the edge of the bed and she gives a small yelp.

“No, Magnus Burnsides, don't you _dare_ —”

And because she's laughing and grinning at him as they jostle back and forth, he grabs her calf so he won't hurt her as he tugs her right down off of the bed.

She screams half in delight, half in shock, landing on him hard enough to knock his breath from his chest—or maybe it's just because she lands on him and immediately rolls so they’re face-to-face.  

He wants to kiss her. He wants to kiss her.

Maybe he would have, because she looks at him and it’s like it’s burning him alive. He reaches out and cups his hand against her shoulders and she grins at him, her glasses sliding down her nose, and he gently nudges them back up with his other hand. She tips her head slightly and crosses her arms against his clavicle, smiling indulgently down at him.

She looks like she’s waiting; she looks like she does when she’s done something on the sly, like the time she moved everything in the galley two inches to the left because Taako refused to pay up on a bet. She’d sat at the table with that same sort of grin as Taako kept running into things, Lup snickering in the background as she waited for Taako to realize what she'd done.

He wants to kiss her, and maybe she wants to kiss him too—but there’s the pounding of feet in the hallway and Lucretia’s door is thrown wide open.

“Lucretia, are you okay—I heard you— _oh_.”

Lup stands in the door, very obviously not in her own clothes, looking rather affronted as she crosses her arms and cocks her hip. “Well, looky here,” she drawls, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh _shit_ ,” Lucretia mumbles, scrambling up off of Magnus. He lets her slip from his grasp and tries to not be angry with Lup for running when Lucretia screamed—he’s honestly surprised the rest of the ship hasn’t followed suit yet—but they were so close to… His face burns and he looks up at Lucretia’s ceiling, studying the shifting hues of the galaxy she’d painted there.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Lup says slowly.

“Lup, _don’t_ ,” Lucretia mumbles. He hears her walk over to the door, and he keeps his eyes up on the ceiling. Sits up when he hears more people in the hallway.

He sees Lucretia and Lup trade looks, and they both slide out of the room, closing the door behind them with a practiced ease only Lup could pull off.

“Lucretia, we heard you scream,” Davenport’s voice is muffled through the door.

“I—I thought I saw something move, it was just Fisher, I’m so sorry.”

He cups his hands in his face. Why are they hiding he’s there? Why did he freeze up? Is Lucretia ashamed that he’d stayed the night, that Lup saw them like that? It wasn’t anything at all only… he wanted it to be, and…

 _If you leave now, we can make it seem like we were out on a walk_.

Barry’s voice startles Magnus out of his thoughts, the spell quiet in his ears.

He rises slowly, rolling his back to get the few kinks out of his shoulders. He slips out of Lucretia’s door and joins Barry in the hallway.

“C’mon,” Barry says, beckoning Magnus into the lab.

“Why… all the secrecy?” he mumbles as they double back around the ship, bypassing the galley to end up on the deck.

“Well,” Barry says slowly. “Lup told me to bail you out. The request itself, I think, came from Lucretia.”

Magnus wrinkles his nose and sighs. “I mean… I’d rather the team just tease the shit out of us than skulk around like that.”

Barry leans up against the railing, raising an eyebrow. “And what were you doing in Lucretia’s room?”

“…Fi…sher?” Magnus ventures hesitantly.

“At _dawn_?”

“ _Uh_ ,” Magnus mumbles, feeling his neck burn with embarrassment. “I mean, I don’t know, what was Lup doing wearing your clothes?”

“That doesn’t work as a retort because one: everyone _know_ s already,” Barry says, although his cheeks are a little pink. “And, two, unless you want everyone to assume you meant you’re sleeping with Lucretia—”

“No! That’s not—we didn’t!” Magnus says, a little too quickly to be entirely believable. “No,” he repeats firmly. “She… she’s not been sleeping, so I—well, fuck, now it just sounds dirty. This is your fault.”

Barry laughs and motions for him to continue.

“She’s… been, I’m sure everyone’s noticed; she’s not… she gets scared and startled even though she’s… she’s putting herself out there,” he says, rubbing his face. “She’s doing a lot, and it’s not bad, but sometimes she’s… just really not herself. And I got worried and, I started noticing… a lot of things. Um. But, she… I went out for a jog the other night and her door was open, and she wasn’t… sleeping well, and she started crying, and… God, what if I fucked it all up back then, what if my big mouth was why we were all… and she…?”

“I think we were fucked from the beginning on that one,” Barry says gently. “If anything, your uh… well, we knew what was coming to us, at the end, there.”

“I didn’t want them to find her,” he says. “I just… I was panicking, like, what the hell, who can judge us? It’s like you said, like Capt’n’port said, we’re doing our best, we’ve earned our faults. And they knew she was out there—we needed to get out, we needed to get to the ship, and what if that had… What if we made it worse for her?”  

“Yeah,” Barry answers gently. “Magnus, what’s going on, really, between the two of you? You’ve been sticking close, this cycle. Close to home, close to Lucretia. It’s not like we’re out and about this year, but you tend to do a little more wandering.”

“I can’t leave her alone again,” he says, like it’s the simplest answer in the world. “If that happened to Lup—you wouldn’t just… fuck off and do whatever.”

“Lup and I are—you’re _right_ , but what we are, it’s not the same as you and Lucretia. Is it?”

Magnus blinks, brows pinching. At first, he doesn’t quite understand why Barry’s asking—of course they’re not, of course it’s a separate thing, but then he realizes that he’s been talking like they are. He’s been acting like they _are_ together, or about to be, or that it’s some forgone and accepted conclusion to the others.

The team teasing Barry and Lup for getting caught kissing or causing a racket when they’re flirting isn’t the same as what it would be if Lucretia had been caught with him in her room, sprawled out on top of him in her pajamas. They might all be family on board, but he remembers how embarrassed he’d been about Taako teasing him on a wayward stare—he can’t even fathom how mortifying it would be to be teased about Lucretia sprawled across his chest. And that’s just _him_ , he doesn’t even know what Lucretia would do.

“Barry,” he says slowly. The revelation is a big one, something that’s been coming from the second he saw Lucretia slip to her knees after they returned to their recorded states—it’s been coming like the black eye every year, like the Hunger chases after them, like the Light falls. It’s been coming, and he’s a fool for letting it catch him off guard. “How did you know you were in love with Lup? Like, in love—not some little thing? Was it like this… _this is it, this is big_ moment? Was it like that?”

“Something like that,” Barry says slowly, grinning to himself. “Something exactly like that. It was there, already, but there was a time where it all just… it clicked into place, like, _ding_! There you are, I’ve been waiting for you all this time, and I never realized it.”

“I think…” he pauses, then scowls, looking down at his hands. Should he be saying it? Should he still be wondering? But he's sure, he's sure, but for once he wants to hang back, wants to linger because the breadth of what he's realizing is just so large. It's so large and he still comes back to the thought each time: _it's Lucretia, it's Lucretia!_ Something like this, something like this could break them both if he just rushes in, and more than himself, more than anything, he wants to keep her smiling.

“Magnus, listen. I get what you’re trying to ask,” Barry says, clapping his hand to Magnus’ shoulder. “And it’s really sweet, but… Lup gave me explicit instructions to tell you that she’s going to kick your goddamn ass off this ship and into next cycle if you asked even one strange question regarding Lucretia, and I do think that counts, so… Fair warning.”

Magnus looks over at Barry, and finds his face completely serious behind his bed-head and thick black glasses and unshaved jaw. “…Thanks?”

“Not a problem,” Barry says. He claps his hands together, grinning. “Now, I think that Taako’s gonna make waffles, so it’s safe to venture out.”

“…Do I have to keep hiding that I’m spending time with her?”

“No, but I would be more discreet for Lucretia’s sake, especially with the whole spending the night thing,” Barry says, “If Lup doesn’t strike the fear of Pan into you.”

“I get it but,” he says, “Unless Lucretia tells me to scram, I'm not going to leave her all alone when she needs protecting. No one treated you or Lup like this when you two spent time together before Legato.”

“That's the thing,” Barry says, voice almost sad. “Is what you feel something like… reverse survivors guilt? Or is it the real moment? It would be cruel... to leave her like that, especially if you make her dependent on your company. I think that’s what Lup’s worried about, that after the last year, Lucretia’s going to wind up even more closed off than before if too much more changes.”

The accusation hurts him more than he thought it would have, and it makes him angry. Is that what they think? Is that what it looks like? Is that the sort of person they think he is?

Only… they've got him pegged pretty well. If it weren't for his urges to pick up the smallest, most defenseless of them all, would he have ever even noticed? He's been fond of Lucretia for a while, in the way one would distantly admire something they like but don’t really want to make the effort for. 

He’s not sure what he would do if her distress wasn’t so obvious, so poignant, if he didn’t feel so guilty for leaving her behind. Maybe he would, but the fact of the matter is that that’s not how it happened, and it pisses him off. It makes him angry that it makes him second guess every thought he's had for the last week, every side glance her way and the way it had felt so peaceful to hold her as she slept.

“Eat your stupid waffles on your own, I'm going for a jog.”

“Magnus, wait, I didn’t mean—” Barry implores, but Magnus has already vaulted over the edge of the ship, bare feet stinging with the impact.

Okay, so, sure:

Lucretia’s always been a little distant, a little solemn. In the early years, he never really made that much of an effort, but over the years she’s spent more and more time with him—he’s known since year one that she had the potential for something more than her quietness, from the solidness of her answer and passion at the press conference, the way she would hide her laughter at off-colored jokes, and the way she’d scrunched her face up and shook her head at him like ‘ _fucking really dude?’_ when he had to ask her if it was a bad idea to fight the two-story bear.

But recently, he’s started going to her with tactical questions, because she can see patterns and she understands people. She’s the only person he trusts to remember the small details in big plans, the bits and pieces that he’s not that good with, to keep him from rushing in—sometimes it’s a bit like getting yanked back by his collar, her fingers hooked into him as she scowls and reminds him he’s forgotten to do this or that or that if he would just _wait_ five seconds, he might not have to go in, ax-swinging. She does it with all of them, reminding Merle of things he’s misplaced, and finding parts and pieces for Lup and Barry, just because she sticks around and pays attention.

She’s gotten more and more comfortable with him over time, and ever since their time at the Legato conservatory, when he’d invited her in dead of night to go see the caves and the fish colonies—ever since they saved Fisher, she’s treated him with an ease he’d never thought he’d see from her. He’d been nervous that first year, when they decided to keep Fisher in her quarters, because she would leave when he came around, but that went away easily enough, once she realized he didn’t mind her company, didn’t want to boot her out of her own room.

He's probably the person who knows her best at the moment; Merle’s a close second—he always went out of his way to talk to her more than the others, and Lup might come third, simply because Lucretia is always retranscribing her and Barry’s shitty handwritten notes, and they’ve been spending more and more time just hanging out in the past decade or so. But he's who knows her when she's in her pajamas and humming right back to Fisher like one would meow right back at a cat.

He’s who watched her spit out the lake water on Legato, making horrible faces and dramatically pretending to heave. Who knows she can't fake-quack to save her damn life. No one else knows those moments, they’re just his.

If he had to think about _when_ he stopped thinking of Lucretia as something  untouchable, like china on the tallest shelf, never to be brought down and appreciated for what they are, he really _would_ say the year at Legato—not just because of  all the things their time on that plane allowed for him to learn about her—the humming and singing, the faces, and the distinct lack of quality quacking, and not just because of sharing the anxiety and nervous hope that Fisher would live through the barrier between the planes, but because of how taking up carving had changed the way he looked at things.

Just like you can’t blindly hack at a piece of wood and end up with something unusable for anything but kindling, you just can’t rush at someone like Lucretia.

It’s been a little over eighteen years, he realizes as he jogs in wide loops around the ship. Eighteen, going on nineteen, years since their time at the Legato conservatory.  Had it really been _that_ long? It feels like it was just a few years ago that he’d learned how to carve, that he’d discovered the depths of the talents his friends had, that Barry and Lup became even more inseparable and in love than before, and that, through Fisher, Lucretia had become someone more approachable—fine china no longer.

He’s always admired her intelligence and patience. And now he values more than that—all those silly quirks and all the jokes she delivers with mock-graveness. The strength in the line of her jaw as she sets it, the steadiness her voice takes on when she has something to say now. The way she swore, tears pouring down their face as they materialized on the deck, amazed that they were even there at all. The guilt of doubting her in that moment, the guilt of leaving her alone, the guilt from hearing her cry alone. The strength that has blossomed inside of her in the last year, even though she's crumbling from the weight she took on.

The strength it must have taken to admit that she wasn't okay, that she wouldn't be. The bemusement with which she had taken his offer.

The small handprint on her wall and the outline of a foot in paint, the crack in Fisher’s tank, the journals scattered and torn and the flinching at sudden touches. But the way she had laughed, the way she’d smiled at him, the comfort that she’d taken in his presence…

If he's who can get her to smile, if he's who can get her to sleep, if he's who she trusts to be there because he shoved his way into her space, then that's fine.

Fuck it, who cares what the others think, as long as Lucretia is happy?

No one, that's who. If he can make Lucretia happy after all she did for them, for all the untold stories she suffered through that last year, then the crew can think whatever they like about _him_.

He turns around and heads back to the ship and goes straight to her door. It’s open, and she’s humming to herself as she spreads blueprints out across her desk. He stands for a second, just watching. She has _another_ one of her and Taako’s vivid green drinks, and she has a pen tucked behind her ear, and if watching her like this is supposed to make him waver, it doesn’t.

He knocks gently. “Hey, neighbor.”

_Smooth, Burnsides. Smooth._

She turns and there’s a brief second that Magnus is afraid that they’re just going to gloss over what happened, that she’s going to frown and tell him slowly why she’s sorry but maybe he should just leave her be for a little while, and he inhales sharply in that moment, waiting. But she grins at him, easy and sure and delighted.

“You live three doors down,” she says, “So not exactly.”

He shakes his head at her and laughs, “If you’re going to nitpick, Lucretia, I guess I _won’t_ offer you my friendly neighborhood services.”

She raises an eyebrow and crosses her arms. “That sounds a little sketchy, Magnus. You’re not going to try to sell me fantasy weed again, are you?”

“That was _once_! One time! I was double-dog dared and I didn’t even know you were part of the crew! It’s Lup’s fault!”

She tips her head, but her mouth quivers with the threat of laughter. “All right, all right then. If you’re sure…? Okay, lay it on me.”

“You need a shelf,” Magnus says. “Like, right there.”

Lucretia looks over her shoulder to the wall Magnus points at. “Magnus, my _bed_ is there.”

“It can go somewhere else. You need a _shelf_ , Lucy. I’m going to make you a shelf.”

“Oh, Magnus, I see what you’re going to do and… _really_? Shelving?”

“Yep,” Magnus says, crossing his arms. “Lucretia, you… I think it’ll help if you… change it up in here.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, eyes skimming her still-trashed room with the cracked porthole and the smear of brown-red blood on the white wall and Fisher’s caulked-up tank. Her shoulders sag and she rubs her face slowly.

“Where,” she says finally, “Are we going to move everything when we’re moving furniture?”

“Listen, if we’ve had to walk around Lup and Taako’s piles of shit for all this time when they go looking for the exact perfect bauble for a spell or something, everyone can deal with your things lined up nice and neat down the hall.”

“Magnus, have you ever made a shelf before?” she asks.

“Nope!”

“Oh, yikes… Okay, _wow_. Well. If it falls and kills me in my sleep, please feel terrible about it, I guess.”

They both dissolve into snickers and gasps of laughter, and it’s as easy as that: He doesn’t have to coax her, or give any other arguments, all he has to do is sit himself on her bed and they bounce ideas back and forth until she has to go help Barry and Davenport with something in the engine room.

They settle into a rhythm after that—he comes by after dinner and they sit on the floor drafting their various plans.

She produces a floor plan soon enough, giving him the dimensions of the shelf he’s going to build her, and then shyly shows him a sketch of a mural she wants to paint on the walls while they rearrange her furniture. They talk about everything else too—Taako’s new penchant for making matcha lattes for her,  those violently green  tea drinks they found down in the town, and Taako makes them cold and foamy for her, and she _loves_ them; Lup and Barry’s spell that went wrong and made it snow in the bridge for three days and how Lup had shoved a snowball down Davenport’s shirt and had gotten sent into the Corner of Shame for an hour;  the trip they’re all going to make to the lake where they found the Light for a picnic, the town a few miles away.

Sometimes Lucretia gives him small details about the previous year, when the lights have been turned down and everyone else has gone to sleep, her voice soft as she describes empty encampments and stealing food, of how the fear made the engine stall out a few times. How she had to learn to shut it all down and just focus on the thoughts of them to make it go, how she had to learn to just trust in what she couldn’t see.

She takes his hand one night and gently puts his hand to her neck. He feels her pulse under his fingers and she says, simply, “Here, that first time, it was here.”

He knows what she’s talking about—he runs a finger across her throat and she watches him with those dark eyes of hers and he wants to ask her so many things—did she make them suffer? Did she hurt afterwards? Did she have a scar until the very moment they burst through the barrier between dimensions?

“I’ve started training more with Merle and Taako’s helping me spread my combat spells out a bit more evenly. I was thinking, maybe, you could show me some things, too.”

He nods instead of asking, her blood throbbing under his fingers. “Yeah. Definitely. Can you even pick up my weapons?”

“Fuck you,” she laughs, reaching up to flick his forehead. “I’m not that delicate.”

He laughs, too, because he knows she’s right. She’s stronger than any of them gave her credit for, but in some ways, it makes her even more fragile.

She still has nightmares. They’re not as often, not as frequent, but he knows she still has them. He stays with her each night, waking early to slip back into his room as to not repeat that first night, but he thinks the crew knows anyway. But they don’t say anything at all. He sees them watching, sees the looks that flick between them both, and he knows it has to be _killing_ Taako and Merle to keep their noses out of it, but he’s so grateful they don’t mention it at all.

Well, except for Lup. Lup always has to say _something_. Two weeks after that first night, she bursts—he’s seen her glaring at him, seen her purse her lips against her teeth, seen her deliberately hog Lucretia’s attention during the day.

Honestly, he’s not sure _what_ her damage is, but when she corners him one night at four in the morning sneaking from Lucretia’s room, he’s not really surprised.

“Maaaaaaaaagnuss,” Lup calls out, dragging out the syllables of his name. Magnus sighs, turning from his door.

“Yes, Lup?”

Lup leans in the doorway of her room, arms crossed over her breast, managing to make herself look intimidating even though she’s wearing fuzzy unicorn slippers.

“Join me in my office,” she beckons, raising an eyebrow at him.

He sighs and steps to his own death, again.

Lup closes the door behind them both with a quiet snap, and she’s on him in seconds.

“What are you doing sneaking out of Lucretia’s room every night—I thought Barry told you I was going to kick your ass to next cycle,” she hisses.

“What the fuck, Lup?”

She prods him in the chest, “I want you to stop panting after her! She’s so—after last year—I’m, she’s so different and I want you to leave her be so she won’t break!”

“I know she is!” Magnus snaps, and he brushes her hand off of him. “I know, and if you’d leave me alone, you’d fucking realize that I’m trying to help hold her together!”

“The only thing you’re helping is trouble,” Lup retorts. “Think about Lucretia, and how she’s feeling through all of this, and what happens to her when she’s okay again, when you get bored and fuck off on her?”

“Why the fuck,” he starts, taking a step back so he won’t shove Lup like he’s itching to, “Does everyone seem to be painting me as some flake-off asshole who’s just out to get a lay—”

“If she cries because you fuck her over,” Lup hisses, getting right back into his face. Sparks fly off her fingers in her agitation as she throws her hands out in an expansive gesture. “I swear to whatever god is in this stupid plane that I will serve up nothing but whoopass for dinner, you’ll eat nothing but my fucking fists, you’ll regret you even _looked_ at Lucy.”

“The fuck is your problem! It’s not your business—does Lucretia even _know_ you’re doing this? You keep spouting off that _I_ should be thinking about her, but I don’t think she’d be happy to know you’re doing this,” he shoots back.

Lup steps back, face going slack.

“He’s right,” Barry says from under the pile of pillows on the bed. Magnus raises an eyebrow in the direction of the bed as Lup turns  hissing ‘babe, shut up’ under her breath, but the damage has been done. “I mean, babe, he is—Lucretia hasn’t been happy you’re pissed off with him.”

Lup turns back to Magus, scowling even as her cheeks flush dark.

“What even is this about?” he asks, and Lup shakes her head, crossing her arms tightly, mouth pinched in a sullen scowl. “Okay, so you’re not gonna explain. You done then?”

“I’m done,” she huffs, shoulders slumping. “I’m done.”

“Okay, this was the opposite of a good talk. Bad talk, bad talk we just had,” he says, and he ducks out of the room as Lup reaches down to yank a slipper off. It hits the door right as he closes it, thudding with the force of her aim.

It bothers him, though—both Barry and Lup seem to have some nugget of information that he’s missing, something that trips him up and makes him uncomfortable in the routine he and Lucretia have made.

“Do you think we should have more, uh, more discretion?” he asks that night, after an afternoon of helping Davenport move equipment around to do repairs, listening to Taako, Lup, and Lucretia bicker back and forth about the growing pile of journals in the common area as she totes them out of her room to clean and paint. He felt Lup glaring daggers at him more than once during the course of the day, and after dinner, when he was helping Taako put up the dishes, the wizard had simply raised his eyebrows and went _‘So, you and Lucretia are a thing yet or what? Because Lulu’s going to fuckin’ explode soon’_ , and honestly, he’d just ran for it. He’s pretty sure Taako’s _still_ laughing at him.

“What?”

“Like… do you think we’re… don’t you think this looks a little indecent?” he leads.

Lucretia turns from the wall, hands smudged with paint; there’s some on her cheek, too, and even though she’s scowling at him, it’s cute. He wants to get up and wipe it off. He doesn’t.

“Oh no, you can see my ankles,” she says, “And my wrists! And we’re alone without a chaperone! How scandalous! …Like that, right?”

He laughs and shakes his head, “No, well sort of. I mean, like— we’re alone, and it’s night, and…”

“Magnus, if you want to make it indecent, by all means, go on ahead,” she says dryly, raising her eyebrow at him. She shakes paintbrush at him in accusation. “Pan only knows it wouldn’t be the first time one of you just got their dick out in front of me or Lup. Won’t be the last. Please, shock and awe me.”

He laughs again at the dryly resigned tone, heat crawling into his face. “Luce, no,” he manages through his snickering. “I mean—it’s whatever, _we_ know what we’re doing, it’s just… the rest of the crew? Would that bother you if they thought we were… doing something we’re not? If someone, uh, like, say… Lup or Taako… saw me leaving your room in the mornings…?”

“I’m not concerned,” Lucretia says softly. She pauses to put down her pallet and brush before going  to sit beside Magnus on the bed.

He reaches out without thinking, drawing her to him. It’s become a habit, now, to hold her until she falls asleep. Her hands are covered with paint and sweat sticks against his skin where she lays her cheek against him; he finds he doesn’t mind at all. His fingers touch the still-drying paint on her elbow where it's tacky to the touch. She leans into him, a small smile on her lips.

“It sounds harsh,” she muses. “But, I’m really not worried about what the crew’d think. I… enjoy your company, Magnus. And I’m… thank you, for what you’re doing,” she continues. “It means a lot to me, and that’s why… it’s inconsequential to me, if they happen to… Well. Make assumptions.”

He rests his chin on her head, and she turns her face to his throat. He puts a hand on the back of her neck, closing his eyes as he presses his nose to the top of her head, up against where her hair is balled up into a messy bun, stray curls tickling his face as he breathes.

Lup can kick his ass into next century, he doesn’t care. This is worth it, even if he never does more than this.

“I have to get back to work on this,” Lucretia murmurs, her fingers coming up to rest against the collar of his shirt. She smoothes her fingers over it idly, side to side in a repetitive motion that drives his heart into his mouth. “Taako’s gonna kill me if I don’t get my journals moved off of the sofa. He said he was just gonna chunk them into the hallway.”

“You know, I think that Taako can move them with a spell,” Magnus says, clutching her closer.

“No, I have a _system_ ,” she insists.

“A system, huh. Of course.”

She laughs, her eyes closing—he can feel her lashes on his neck, the way her breath is hot on his skin. He drops his hand to the curve of her waist, soft and warm under his palm, even through her shirt, and he pulls her with him, lying down on his side on her bed.

He runs his hand up her side, tracing the curve of her from her hip to her shoulder, and  he leans back to look at her. She’s looking at him the way she’s been looking at him lately, like she’s lost and he can show her the way.

He _wants_ to show her the way forward, even though he’s not sure of it himself. If he takes her hand, they can figure it out together, and if they get lost, then he’d at least be with her. They’d be together, and she wouldn’t be alone out there. He hopes to every god in the system he’s not interpreting it wrong, that she wants this, enjoys this in some way, that she’d let him take her hand, walk forward with her into the unknown, have her pull him back when he’s too rash.

“It’s late, Lucretia,” he whispers to her. “I’ll move them for you, if you don’t want Taako messing them up.”

He brushes his thumb against her cheek, tracing the dark circle under her eye, fingers touching the splatters of paint on her skin.

“I have a system,” she repeats. “They’re indexed.”

“Listen to you,” Magnus chuckles.

Her brows furrow and her lips purse up into a pout. “They are,” she insists. “And I will end anyone who messes them up again,” she promises, looking up at Magnus with those dark eyes of hers.

He remembers the journals on the floor, the smear of blood, and he remembers faintly that she _did_ kill the last people who messed up her system. Just not for that reason.

“I won’t mess it up,” he promises. “Tell me how you have them indexed; I’ll leave it just like that.”

She looks at him and sighs slowly, biting her lip as she thinks. He gently pulls her lip from her teeth with his thumb, tipping her chin back to study her face. “Lucy,” he whispers, “You should sleep. We’re not doing this so you can stay up all night—this is so you can be comfortable in here again.”

She makes a sound like he’s punched her in the gut, her breath rushing out of her in a long sigh. “You’re right,” she says. “I… I need to take my contacts out, at least.”

“Okay,” he agrees. “Okay. Go take your eyeballs out, Lucretia.”

She shakes her head fondly at him, sitting up slowly. She touches his arm, looking at him with her head tipped to the side. “Magnus,” she says slowly. “You can stay there, tonight. I feel bad for you, sleeping on the floor like that.”

“Where… are you going to sleep?”

She looks towards the door, then back at him, shrugging. “The bed, too, I guess.”

“Ah…”

She slips from the bed, holding one arm to her side tightly. He thinks he sees a hint of color on her dark cheeks, but it could be a trick of the light, could be him projecting his own flush outwards onto her. “You… just… think about it,” she says softly.

And how can he say no? How can he, when he’s cold from where she’d slipped away, when holding her is both the most nerve-wracking and peaceful thing he’s ever done?

How can he bear to move when she comes back and turns off the lights, and slides in beside him, curling up small next to his chest, the knot of the headscarf she sleeps in tickling his inner elbow where her cheek is next to his bicep? When she smiles and whispers a good night, her arm stretching over his shoulder, her body pressed flush to his as she puts her glasses on the nightstand behind him?

And how can he slip out in the early hours of the morning when it’s the first time she doesn’t stir and wake in terror, because she’s already in his arms?

It breaks his heart—this feeling breaks his heart with its warmth and sweetness and he loves her. He knows it now, knew it the second he asked Barry; knew it before that, even, when he woke up and she was looking down at him.

He loves her, more than anything. Loves the purse of her lips when she frowns and the way her teeth flash when she grins, how she frets over the organization of her journals, carefully showing him how she’s coded each spine, a small dab of paint, each cycle color coded into a gradient of color that spans their sixty five plus years in a slow rainbow when lined up side by side. Loves her simple delight at moving her furniture around to make room for the new shelves he’s made for her—loves how she teased the shit out of him because they’re sort of lopsided.

The way she looks when she paints her walls, eyes closed as she sweeps broad colors in as he reads out the scene from her journals, her neat hand describing it all, from the lush verdant forests of their first year in the animal kingdom to the eerie glow of the mushroom world. Loves the ache in his throat as he reads her entry on the day he died, the way it throbs in his chest when he looks up and sees the tear roll down her cheek, her eyes shining as she nods absently as his voice dies, watching her dry brush over the edges of a design, mimicking the glow from that world. Loves the way her voice shakes as she swears at him about the stupid hard candy that killed him, loves how she laughs as he tells her he’d really wanted some, and yes, it was good enough to die for (not really).

In the days that follow, as they shift her room and she paints over the white and silver walls, he catalogues each thing he loves, some known (she drinks the milk from her cereal with her spoon instead of from the bowl) and some brand new (she has a stockpile of alcohol and chocolate in her closet, which she looks more than absolutely mortified he found). They pile up inside of him, one by one, and he catalogues them just like he helps her put back her journals; the feeling of her fingers against his is bright yellow. The fondness he feels when she rolls her eyes at something is the color of their home-world’s sky. Holding her is the same color of green as the matcha drinks she’s made him try each day, floral and light and cold on his tongue. It’s so indescribably sappy that when he thinks about it consciously, he cringes and covers his face with his hands, a grin spreading across his lips in his giddy embarrassment.

Slowly, they finish the project of cleaning and reorganizing her room. The last journal is placed, the last piece of clothing is folded and stored away, and her art supplies are recapped and placed precisely in their caddies. The paint has been scrapped from the floor and the porthole window has been replaced. She has new sheets and a strand of enchanted lights over her bed, a gift from Davenport himself.

She stands in front of Fisher’s tank, her fingers tracing over the caulking in the glass, looking thoughtful. Fisher’s tentacles follow the movement of her hand.  

“Maybe now that it’s done,” he says softly, his chest tight and heavy. “You won’t have any more nightmares.”

Lucretia shakes her head. “I… I think I’ll have them for the rest of my life, Magnus.”

“But you’ve—you’ve been sleeping so well,” he protests, taking her shoulders in his hands. He presses his forehead to hers. “It’ll get better, I swear.”

“Magnus, do you want to know the dream that scares me the most?” she asks softly, turning her head away from his. “It’s not about the bandits or the bounty hunters. It’s not hearing them call for me in the night. Or about fixing the ship, or the Hunger coming. It’s not the fighting or the stealing or the pain I felt. It’s… It’s when I woke up and left you behind.”

“I left all of you to die,” Lucretia whispers, tears slipping down her face. “I didn’t know about the judges until later, I thought you all… were going to die from your injuries… I couldn’t wake you up, I tried, but I—you wouldn’t wake up, Magnus, it was like the stupid—that stupid mushroom world all over, you were gone but you looked like you’d just fallen asleep, and it was just like that _again_.”

“You did your best,” he says softly. He reaches out and touches her cheek. Her eyes fall shut and she exhales slowly, and he can’t help but to slide his fingers over the curve of her cheek, palm cradling her face.

“Lucy,” he whispers, surprised at how hoarse it comes out.  He raises his other hand and slips it against her neck, thumb resting against her jaw. Her fingers touch his knuckles, cool and shaking.

He can see the tremble of her lashes as her eyes dart back and forth; he can feel the displacement of air as she sucks in a breath through her mouth.

Whatever he was going to say is lost in it, lost in the tug forward; it’s been building for so long, and he sees it, plain on her face. How long has she been holding this in? As long as he has? Longer?

He tips her head up just so, leaning down to bring them together. At first, he just ghosts his lips over hers, a soft movement as his mouth opens from the shock of kissing her. Then another, and another, until the light touches are a firm press, and she sighs against him, her body sinking against his as she grips his wrists against her face.

He tries to pull away, just to check if she’s okay, and she surges onto her toes, her mouth firm against his own, hands leaving his wrists as she wraps her arms around his neck. He cradles her cheek still, but he lets one hand drop down, ghosting against her side, then around to the small of her back. She sighs softly, lips parting and he feels a rush as he parts his lips too, and she takes the chance to pull his bottom lip between hers, and—holy shit, he thinks his brain just stopped.

She drags her teeth over his lip as she slips back, and he follows her without thinking, and she laughs, her fingers curling into his hair.

“What—what’s so funny?”

“I,” she stammers, blinking up at him, shaking her head softly.

She looks awestruck, eyes wide even though she’s beaming. Her eyes are still damp, tear tracks glistening in the multi-hued light Fisher’s giving off, but she’s not crying anymore. She shakes her head again, mouth open. She licks her lips and he can’t bring himself to _not_ kiss her again, so he does, chasing after that quick flick of her tongue and her fingers  slide through his hair, curling against the base of his head, urging him against her.

He leans forward, bending down against her as she arches up. She just finished her silly drink, and maybe it should be gross that he tastes it and tastes salt from her tears, but he wants it more than anything. It takes all he has not to pick her up and toss her down onto the bed.

She shifts her head just so, and she pulls away just slightly, her tongue tracing against his lips as he gapes, and when she looks up at him, she laughs, something light and gentle.

“Oh, Magnus,” she sighs, “I’ve only been flirting with you for _ages._ ”

“ _What_?”

She shakes her head again—he seems to make her do that a lot, and instead of making him feel dumb or silly, he just feels tender, makes him want to have her fond exasperation all to himself—and moves one hand to his cheek.

“Yeah,” she laughs. She strokes her fingers against his sideburns, and he turns his head, kissing her fingertips. “I’ve been—well, since after Legato? Oh, no, before that, I think, but that’s when I realized what I was doing, after watching Lup and Barry… But Lup said it hadn’t been obvious when I asked her a few  years back, and she’d said I needed to be assertive…  So this year… well, I didn’t have anything to lose after last cycle, so…I took her advice. And… I’d… I’d been… we… this cycle we got… Um, so I’ve been hoping that… _Yeah_.”  

He takes the hand from her face, surprised at how cold his hand feels away from her face. He grips her wrist gently, kissing her palms, over the semi-circle calluses her nails made from her constant writing, her constant drawing.

 “Lup, huh? She knew?”

Lucretia gives an apologetic shrug, her eyes fixed on his mouth and her hand. He parts his lips against her flesh,  teeth scraping against the very center of her hand. The noise she makes is ragged and it raises gooseflesh down his neck, mouth going dry and stomach hot.

“Is that why I got the shovel talk and a, what did she say, a ‘can of whoopass for dinner’?” he asks, to distract himself. He feels a bit raw after hearing that sound, and when he looks over at her, Lucretia looks like it too, her face something hazy and unfocused, lips parted. He presses his luck, tongue tracing the line of the crease in her palm, and he watches as her eyes close and her brows knit, teeth finding her bottom lip. He holds her hand to his mouth, just breathing over the damp flesh, waiting for her to come back to herself.  

“Um. She did that?”

He kisses her hand again, grinning slyly.

“No Magni were harmed in the discussions of shovels and ass kickings,” he promises, and she snickers.

“Magni? There’s more than one of you? God, just when I got a handle of one.”

“Nobody’s got a handle on this,” he laughs.

“So who am I talking to, Magnus one or Magnus two?” she teases, and he grins against her palm. Her eyes scrunch up when she grins like this, with her teeth against her bottom lip and her nose crinkled up.

“That’s not what I call my dick, but if you want to, baby.”

She gives a squeak, mouth falling open in surprise and he thinks he might have overstepped whatever relationship he’d just tripped himself into, but she shakes her head, her fingers gently popping him on the nose. “You’re awful!” she whispers, “Awful! Bad! _Bad_!”

“No, I’m Magnus.”

She groans and shakes her head even harder. “No, no—geeze and crackers, _no_!”

“Then how about we talk about this hand thing you have going on,” he whispers, and she gives a quiet whine, shaking her head as he turns his head slightly, kissing up her palm to the tips of her fingers. He parts his lips against her index finger, giving her the faintest impression of taking her fingers into his mouth.

“H…how about we leave that for later?” she stammers.

“Later’s now,” he says, dropping her hand. It falls to rest on his neck and he cups both hands on her hips, walking her back slowly. “I get that we have time, but when all we do is hurry up and wait…”

She grips his shoulders, keeping hold of him as he leans forward, dipping her back over the bed. She lets herself drop, her breath quick and ragged as she clings onto him, willing him to follow her down. He does.

“As long as there’s no more puns,” she whispers.

“I can’t promise you shit,” he laughs against her neck, hands already sliding up her shirt.

“I’ll keep my expectations low so I’ll be impressed,” she says with a smirk.

He drags his fingers against her sides, feeling her shiver up against him. Her legs slip around his hips and his stomach burns and clenches and it’s like he’s been clobbered in the chest.

He sweeps his thumbs up and over the material of her bra, and she closes her eyes, humming quietly. He leans up and kisses the sides of her mouth, her forehead, her cheeks, her chin. She’s laughing and tipping her head back for more kisses.

“I’m very impressive,” he says against the hollow underneath her ear.

“No, I thought you were Magnus,” she says and he gives a sudden laugh, loud against her ear and she presses her cheek against him, hands flat on his back.

It’s overflowing, fond and hot and so, so much that it hurts. It bubbles up out of his skipping heart and up his throat and into his mouth and up and up and up and out. 

“I love you,” he breathes, throat burning as she nuzzles against him, his hands clutching her waist. “Lucretia, I—”

She turns her head and puts one hand on his jaw, turning him to face her. She kisses him, slow and sweet, and she presses their foreheads together once she pulls away, smiling up at him.

“I love you, Magnus,” she murmurs, tears in her eyes.

* * *

And she does, she does even when he doesn’t remember her, even when he gives his heart to someone else, even when she sees the beginnings of mistrust form on his face, she loves him through it all. That’s just how she is; she loves him even when it begins to change to the sort of love that lingers and supports her, but that she doesn’t seek out. The way they were was lost to time, lost to Fisher, lost to the mistakes she made in the heat of the moment and in the despair of her love.

She may have lost him as her lover, as her friend, as her family, but he is not lost. And that’s enough.

(And the shelf. She keeps the shelf.)


End file.
